"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."
Edmund Burke. What happened on this Day in History?

Thursday, June 28, 2012

This Day in History: Jun 28, 1914: Archduke Ferdinand assassinated

On this day in 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and
his wife Sophie are shot to death by a Bosnian Serb nationalist during
an official visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. The killings
sparked a chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War I
by early August. On June 28, 1919, five years to the day after Franz
Ferdinand's death, Germany and the Allied Powers signed the Treaty of
Versailles, officially marking the end of World War I.

The
archduke traveled to Sarajevo in June 1914 to inspect the imperial armed
forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908.
The annexation had angered Serbian nationalists, who believed the
territories should be part of Serbia. A group of young nationalists
hatched a plot to kill the archduke during his visit to Sarajevo, and
after some missteps, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip was able to shoot the
royal couple at point-blank range, while they traveled in their official
procession, killing both almost instantly.

The assassination
set off a rapid chain of events, as Austria-Hungary immediately blamed
the Serbian government for the attack. As large and powerful Russia
supported Serbia, Austria asked for assurances that Germany would step
in on its side against Russia and its allies, including France and
possibly Great Britain. On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on
Serbia, and the fragile peace between Europe's great powers collapsed,
beginning the devastating conflict now known as the First World War.

After
more than four years of bloodshed, the Great War ended on November 11,
1918, after Germany, the last of the Central Powers, surrendered to the
Allies. At the peace conference in Paris in 1919, Allied leaders would
state their desire to build a post-war world that was safe from future
wars of such enormous scale. The Versailles Treaty, signed on June 28,
1919, tragically failed to achieve this objective. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's
grand dreams of an international peace-keeping organization faltered
when put into practice as the League of Nations. Even worse, the harsh
terms imposed on Germany, the war's biggest loser, led to widespread
resentment of the treaty and its authors in that country--a resentment
that would culminate in the outbreak of the Second World War two decades
later.